Wadada Leo Smith
Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith ( born December 18, 1941 in Leland, Mississippi) is an American trumpeter, composer and musicologist who is mainly active in the fields of Creative jazz and new music improvisation. After Steve Lake, he has one of the most personal trumpet voices of the American avant-garde jazz. Besides Lester Bowie - albeit with a warmer, more rounded sound than this - " he is the most important trumpeter of the Chicago avant-garde and to some extent as the Poet. "
Life and work
Smith initially took music lessons by his stepfather, the blues singers and guitarists Alex "Little Bill" Wallace. He learned his main instrument during high school and furthered his formal music training during his military service in 1963. Initially he played drums, and Mellophone French Horn, before focusing on the trumpet. He played in rhythm & blues bands and moved in 1967 to Chicago, where he was a member of the Chicago AACM was in the same year. Together with Leroy Jenkins and Anthony Braxton, he founded the Trio Creative Construction Company. In 1971 his record label Kabell. In the early seventies he formed the band New Dalta Ahkri, in the Henry Threadgill, Anthony Davis and Oliver Lake played ( Wildflowers, 1976).
During the 1970s he studied ethnomusicology at Wesleyan University. Already at this time he designed concepts for solo performances and controlled collective improvisations and extended, despite significant roots in the tradition, the vocabulary of the instrument to abstract timbres. He played again with Anthony Braxton, but also took up with Derek Bailey 's Company and Gunter Hampel. 1979 to 1982 he played in a trio with Peter Kowald and Günter Baby Sommer, which was a very open game shape. 1983 was the album The Blue Mountain 's Sun Drummer duo with Ed Blackwell. Mid-1980 Smith was Rastafarian and used for the first time the name Wadada. Around 1990, he played regularly in New York City with Jeanne Lee. In addition to trumpet and flugelhorn, which he alienated electronically, Smith uses instruments from other musical cultures such as kalimba, Atenteben ( Ghanaian bamboo flute) and koto; He has also conducted courses on instrument building. His compositions are often graphically notated in a separate system ( Ankhrasmation ).
John Zorn produced the Golden Quartet, a supergroup in the Smith with Anthony Davis, Malachi Favors and Jack DeJohnette worked. Published in 1998, Smith with guitarist Henry Kaiser album Yo, Miles! as a tribute to the Rock Jazz Miles Davis. There, playing Smith, Emperors and numerous other musicians cover versions, but also his own compositions, inspired by this music. In live performances of this tribute was also performed with musicians from the Rova Saxophone Quartet. Since November 2005, he again plays with baby summer (mostly in duet ) together. In the fall of 2011 in Los Angeles his great work Ten Freedom Summers was premiered, which takes up three evenings and contains, besides the Golden Quartet and chamber music elements. 2012 appeared the eponymous album on Cuneiform.
Under Smith's recordings, the solo albums Kulture Jazz (1992 ) and Red Sulphur Sky ( 2002), further Tao Njia and Golden Heart Remembrance with its permanent, existing since 1970 in variants group N'da be highlighted Kulture.
Smith's teaching activities began 1975/76 at the University of New Haven and led over lecturer at the Creative Music Studio in Woodstock (New York) ( 1975-1978 ) and at Bard College (1987 to 1993) in 1993 appointed to the Dizzy Gillespie Chair at the California Institute of the Arts, which he still holds.
Prizes and awards
Smith won in 1981 as a trumpeter the critics poll of Down Beat. 2013 he was with Ten Freedom Summers finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.